Intro and General Description

Welcome to the 4th video of the “Beginner’s Guide to Art Fundamentals.” I’m the guy
that’s going to be having a one sided conversation with you for the next hour and a half.
And today, I’m going to be talking about color. So, what is color? It’s a phenomenon
where an object receives a spectrum of light summarized to ROYGBIV and reflects a
particular color of the spectrum back into our eyes… But what does color mean to us as
artists? Well, in my opinion it’s primary purpose in painting is to help emphasize the
emotional impact of the painting. Nothing makes a rainy day feel more dreary than
combining it with a grayish blue. Nothing makes a scene feel more powerful and full of
action than a good red or orange. Colors give our brains a natural subconscious
reaction to them, they make us feel a certain way that we can’t always explain, all we
can say is that we FEEL a certain way about it. And while some people’s feelings
towards one color may be different from another person’s, there are some general
theories and rules that make it easier for us as an artist to help give someone that
nudge towards a specific emotion.

Most of these fundamental videos have a breakdown of sub-categories. Color is a little

different, there are rules and definitions within color theory that could count as a
sub-category, but is more of a portion of color that you simply learn to consider on top of
everything else. Things like hue, saturation, color temperature, etc. They are parts of a
bigger theory and are interchangeable. A theory we will go into deeply throughout the
video. If you’ve watched the episode on values already you’ll know that when I
discussed the form principle, there are parts of it that can fluctuate, but not parts that
can be changed or moved. Color is much more ambiguous and theoretical. When a
painting in absolute black and white can make us feel a certain emotion even being
devoid of all color, than what’s the use of color other than to emphasize that emotion?

Which brings us to our first talking point!

Values vs. Color

Values, the brightness and darkness of a particular subject. And color, the portion of a
spectrum that is being reflected off of an object and sent shooting into our eyeballs. It
sounds so attractive like that. In the episode prior to this one I discussed how values are
what help give something 3-dimensionality. Color is like the sweet sugar added on top
of an already good looking dessert. In fact when you take an illustration like this one by
the wonderful Mike Azevedo who is an artist known for his use of color and separate the
color and the values, this is what you have. Color is completely dependant on the
underlying value, otherwise it’s a mess of hues and and differing levels of saturation.
The colors might look nice together, they might compliment each other due to super
secret color knowledge that we will go into later. But they don’t have any substance to
them other than their own hue and how saturated they are. (Also, Mike has his own
gumroad tutorial on color and it’s super helpful so you should go check it out.)

This is a subject I wanted to get out of the way early on to help new artists wrap their
brains around the concept of color. Although all objects we see reflect some type of
color, unless you’re color blind, that is not what an object is made or constructed out of.
You have to train your brain slowly over time through observation and application of
what you observe to see past the color. Color can confuse us and make an object
appear brighter or darker than it really is. Understanding the basics to values can help
you identify how bright or dark a color might really be. I know I’ve started waaaay too
many paintings where I didn’t realize until a few hours in that a large portion of my
painting was either too light or too dark. This usually happens because you are
considering the colors you’re using over the values and they are playing tricks on your
brain. Don’t let the colors trick you!
Over the course of this video I’ll be talking about every aspect of beginner color theory
that I think is important for someone to learn and apply into their work as soon as
possible. While I go over all of this and it will be fun and exciting and there will probably
be some cool stuff you never knew about color, just remember that values are the
substance, the structure of your painting, color is the flavor. And sometimes, there can
be too much flavor.

Color Theory

Alright, let’s get to the core of color theory. I’ll be naming off various subjects of color
and defining them. Taking a deep look into each one and try and give you, a potentially
fresh artist or artist who maybe already knows a bit about color theory, a wider view of
color. By the end of all of this I hope you take color seriously and take the time to
experiment with your colors before jumping in to your next illustration, if there is
anything I don’t see enough of, it’s people planning out their colors. But anyway, let’s
get into it.

Color Wheel:

The first thing to talk about is of course, the color wheel. There is a thing in art, and it’s a
wheel, of color… The color wheel is a perfectly balanced representation of the major
colors in the spectrum of colors that we see. And unfortunately, they aren’t always the
same. In the modern day there are three major color wheels that you will probably hear
about. There is RYB, RGB, and CMYK. All of these color wheels have the same colors
within them, some just use different methods for color mixing. But that’s stuff you
honestly probably don’t need to worry about anytime soon, or ever, let’s go with ever. All
you need to know is that when working traditionally, you’re using RYB. When working
digitally, you’re using RGB. And when working with printing in mind, you’re using CMYK.
RYB stands for Red, Yellow, and Blue. RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. And
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and “Key” which means black basically…
stupid CMYK.

So these colors that they represent are what are known as the primary colors. All colors
within these color wheels can be made by combining the primary colors with another
color. For instance, to create what’re called the secondary colors, you’d combine each
primary with another. So for RYB, if you combine Red with Yellow, you’ll get Orange,
that’s a secondary color. Yellow and Blue create Green, and Blue and Red create
Violet. Knowing the placement of these colors will be very important when we discuss
color schemes later on in the video. So take time to learn your mediums color wheel
and understand it’s primary and secondary colors well.

Hue:
I’ve mentioned hue a few times, and I’m just now making sure we’re all on the same
page and understand what the hell I mean by it? Man I suck… everybody… complain to
me. Ask for a refund. It’s fine, clearly I’m bad at this teaching thing. Now if you’ll excuse
me… (gunshot and thud).

Hue is what color something is… Yeah that sounds simple, but that’s basically it. There
is a spectrum of color that we can see. I mentioned this just before when talking about
color wheels. The primary and secondary colors, these are the major colors our brains
can pick up on. Now there are endless hues between each of these too though. So if we
consider the average color wheel that you’d see in a digital program like Photoshop, this
outer area would be your hue. It’s a seamless array of colors transferring into one
another.

Hue itself isn’t necessarily something you can master, only something you can practice
observing and recognizing. Knowing what hue something is at a glance and being able
to replicate it. Hue is only a small part to the larger picture. Like the next subject.
Saturation:
So you’ve grabbed your hue, great! You’re ready to start painting that moody scene of
someone walking down the street. We’ll just start by painting a road here and… Oh…
Oh roads aren’t that blue.

Saturation is the purity of a color. What I mean by that is there are many variations of
the color blue for instance. There is blue at its purest, or most saturated form. And then
there is blue at one of its weakest purities. And there are many transitions between
those points. Saturation is a much harder thing to grasp than hue. It’s easy to know
what kind of a color we want to paint, but it’s hard knowing how we want to paint it, and
that’s what saturation is really. It’s “how can I show this hue in my painting without it
coming off too strong?”

Learning when to desaturate is something that takes a lot of practice, and is tougher
knowing that it varies from painting to painting. As unfortunately complicated as it
sounds, the saturation of one color depends on the saturation of another. Not all colors
can have equal saturation or else the painting would feel chaotic and unbalanced. Other
colors have to step aside on saturation to help other colors stand out. This is all stuff we
will cover further on in the video though. For now just understand that saturation is, in
basic terms, how gray a color is versus it at its purest form.

Local Color:

This one is simple, it’s the color of the object you are painting if there were a completely
even, neutral light shining on it. You can look at most objects and say, “hey, that’s
yellow, or that’s purple.” That’s the local color. Just try to remember that it’s not quite as
simple as calling something out and saying it’s orange. You need to consider the
saturation now too. Is it a greyish orange? How saturated is the orange? Is it more of a
darker in value, but high saturated orange, making it brown-ish? The majority of the
time, when light is involved, an object will not be painted purely like it’s local color. It
may appear like it’s local color, but small shifts in hue and saturation will almost always
occur.

Color Temperature:

Color temperature is referring to a theory of splitting the color wheel in half, one side is
dedicated to the “cool” colors. The other side is dedicated to the “warm” colors. Cool
colors consist of the green, blue, and purple. While warm colors are made up by yellow,
orange, and red. These color groupings have varying psychological effects on our
brains, warm colors make us think of fire and danger, action. While cool colors usually
make us think of more calming things, water, night time, etc. The reason color
temperature should be defined is primarily to help explain this next portion of color
theory, and it’s arguably the most important.

Color Relativity:

Color relativity is the theory in that if one color is used in a particular area, it will appear
to be a different color than when it is alone. So you may have seen these type of things
on the internet of “oh my god can you believe these are the same colors?!” With two
swatches of the same color used on top of different colors. That’s basically what I’m
referring to here. But the reason this is so important is because we can use this theory
to our advantage to help make the colors throughout a 3-dimensional form feel more
natural and harmonious.

Look at this example I’ve drawn up for instance. In this example I have two different
swatches of color. One is a desaturated orange, the other is a desaturated blue. But
when these two different swatches are placed on top of colors that are near them on the
color wheel they both appear to become the same shade of grey, or at least incredibly
similar. However when they are placed off of these colors and set side by side each
other you can clearly see the difference between the two. This is because colors can
play tricks on us, make portions of an image appear brighter or darker, make one color
look like a completely different color, etc. In this example, you can see I’ve used a
swatch of pure grey on top of a combination of warm colors and on a combination of
cool colors. The grey will generally appear as a cooler color on top of the warm colors
and will appear as a warmer color on top of the cool colors. The other strange thing that
color can do is change our perception of the values in an image. In this example, I’ve
used the same swatch of a saturation teal on top of the previous warm and cool color
combinations, but the teal swatch pops off of the warm colors so much more, making it
appear brighter and as if it has more contrast in it’s values than the comparison of it with
the cool colors. But if we pull up this same image in greyscale we can clearly see that
the contrast is practically identical, and the only difference in the two combination of
colors is the contrast between warm and cool or the lack of contrast with nothing but
cool colors on top. You can see the exact same results if we were to reverse this
process and place a warm swatch inside both color combinations.

One of the biggest rules to color theory is this: If you have a warm light source, you will
have cool shadows. If you have a cool light source, you will have warm shadows. A
warm light being the sun, any average yellow desk lamp, firelight, etc. Cool light being
bright blue ambient light from the sky, your average white fluorescent light, stuff like
that. Now this doesn’t mean that just because you’re painting a person in sunlight that
all of a sudden they’re shadows become this saturated blue, even if you do have the
correct values in place. What this is referring to is color relativity. A cool shadow isn’t
necessarily a literal cool color, but more of the inference of a cool color. If we take a
head like this one and add a shadow to it like this, it will look flat. There is no change in
color, no hue shifting, nothing. But if all we do is take this same color, shift it’s hue
slightly towards the cool colors and desaturate it, it will appear to be more of a cool
color. This is the case even if there isn’t a cool colored ambient light shining in on the
shadow. Even if there was a warm light creeping into the shadows from a surrounding
area it would still appear cooler compared to the light. Our brains naturally add contrast
to things that there might not be real contrast in. I think this is why studying from
observation and life is a little more crucial to studying from photos. Both work don’t get
me wrong, but there are subtle changes in colors that you won’t see in a photo just due
to how a camera captures color versus our eyes.

Color relativity is a weird thing to try and grasp. I think some of the best uses of it would
be in movies though. Next time you are watching a movie and the scene is heavily blue
or orange or something, try to look at the image critically and ask yourself if the colors
you are really looking at are their actual local colors? Or do they only appear that way to
you because of the surrounding colors?

Color and the Form Principle:

Color can change more than you might expect from it’s local color when affected by
certain light sources. But luckily, that’s pretty much all that changes color realistically. If
you change the color of the main light source on an object, naturally color relativity and
temperature will take place and the shadow will appear as a slightly different hue or
saturation. Every aspect of the form principle has to change according to the light
source as well, the highlight will change, the center light, halftone, etc. Because there is
now a different color with a different level of purity shining on the object.

Let’s use this orange ball as an example. If we just tacked some orange color on top of
this sphere it’d look something like this. Which isn’t very accurate, it might look fine to
start. But colors aren’t that bare, the values are carrying the majority of this painting at
the moment and the colors are pretty lifeless, so I’ll go over what we can do to make the
colors pop and feel more realistic. (As a side note though, if when I showed the color
being attached to the sphere you thought it still looked pretty good the way it was, that
goes to show how much of an impact values have over color.) So let’s say this orange
ball is being lit by a warm light, if that’s the case let’s intensify the color in the light side
and let’s tone down the saturation in the shadow side to follow the warm light, cool
shadows rule. If you watched the values video you’ll remember that within the shadow
we still have our reflected light though. The color of the reflected light depends entirely
on the color of the object that is bouncing that light into the object. So if we had this
orange ball on a red desk, it’d appear to be a warm red bouncing into the shadow. If the
desk was blue, we’d have a blue light bouncing into the shadow. All these elements are
used to make this orange ball still realistically be an orange ball when you look at it, but
it is a combination of a couple hues and many levels of saturation. The only time where
you may have a less vibrant and colorful object is in overcast lighting. Overcast lighting
is traditionally seen as the universal light for making something be as true to its natural
color as possible. It’s commonly a bright, grey-ish light being diffused by the clouds
above us allowing light to enter in most areas. But that’s besides the point.

Now that we’ve taken a look at the orange sphere in warm lighting let’s take a look at it
in cool lighting to see how much of a difference it makes. You can see now that the
orange in the light side is more desaturated and the shadow side is almost fully
saturated. Everything on the light side adjusts towards the color of the lightsource, then
our eyes react to that adjustment and fill the surrounding shaded areas with the
opposite color temperature to balance it out.

If you actually take a look at the colors in the orange ball with the blue reflected light, the
reflected light in the ball isn’t even blue. The majority of it is a desaturated red-orange.
That’s because the less saturated a specific hue gets, the closer it looks to be it’s
complimentary color. Which is a topic we will touch on in a little bit. For now there is only
one last thing to talk about in this section of the video.
Colors from life vs. Photos:

There is a reason that even after the internet gave us an infinite amount of naked
people to draw and paint for absolutely free that life drawing is still being done by art
schools and galleries all over the world. It’s because photos can’t capture everything.
There is a significant difference between capturing something realistically and capturing
something that looks like a photo. Most artists will hear this as a “compliment” from your
friends or family while starting out. “Oh that looks like a photo!” or “Oh that looks real!”
There is a difference. There is something about seeing an object, human figure, or a
landscape in person that a photo can’t quite capture. And I’m not biased here honestly, I
have never gone out and done any traditional plein-air painting (which is just a fancy
term for painting what you see outdoors), the most painting from life I’ve done are small
setups I made on my desk with a single desk lamp, some random objects, and a
tablecloth. But even from those small studies I’ve noticed a change in how I perceive
color. I will see a full spectrum of colors in person vs. in a photo. I’ll see purplish hues
and greenish hues in spots I would’ve never imagined seeing those colors.

Photos also have a tendency to tone down the intensity of light or the simplification of
shadow. I never quite understood the idea of shapewelding (which I discuss in the
values episode) until I painted things from life. How the light really pops out at you and
leaves so much of the shadow up to the imagination. There are lessons and techniques
that I think you can only truly see and learn from painting something from life. This
doesn’t mean you need to break out the oil paints and start buying canvases though, I’m
sure that would all be very beneficial, but I’ve never personally done an oil painting in
my whole life. No, all you need is whatever art tools you have at your disposal, and
something in front of you. Whether it’s a graphite pencil or some crayons, if there is
something for you to draw with, there is something for you to do a study from life. Try to
really observe the subtlety in colors. The slight hue and saturation shifts. Don’t be afraid
to place a color down that you think you see even though it makes no sense. More often
than not that lack of fear in color placement will only help your paintings, as long as they
aren’t insanely saturated.

This is all my personal opinion of course, take it or leave it, try it for yourself, whatever
you want to do. But the next topic we’ll be going over is something that is universally
used in art and is the most important part of image making when considering colors.

Color Schemes

Color schemes are the use of one or more colors to create some kind of a visually
balanced and aesthetically pleasing image. They can and should be used in every kind
of painting, character design, landscape, whatever it might be. Color schemes work,
and there are so many kinds out there that it’s almost impossible to not find one that fits
the mood you are shooting for in your painting. Before I jump into each color scheme
and how to replicate them yourself, I want to go over color and how it affects our brains.

Color Psychology:

Our brains work in weird ways. Before we see something in it’s full grand scale, maybe
it’s a painting on the far end of a gallery, we will already have feelings about it. Whether
we like it or dislike it or feel meh about it. We don’t even know the content yet, it’s just a
weird blob of values and colors to us and we already have a thing that clicks in our
heads that says either “I want to go look at that.” or “Meh, that looks missable.” Yes a
large portion of that psychological part of our brain is dedicated to values, but I think a
good portion of that is dedicated to color too. I like to think of it like this, values are what
will make people go “wow, that looks so good.” And color is what makes people say
“wow, that feels so good.” When you see a painting with a color scheme that just fits the
content beautifully it makes you feel all nice inside, seeing something that just looks so
damn juicy. I could see the saddest painting in the world of a widow watching her
husband being buried and I could still think “God damn! Those colors though, they’re on
point girl!”

Different colors will have different interactions with our brains. Certain colors will help
influence the thought of a particular emotion. Red is probably the most common color
you see used in this way. Most people think of anger, power, blood, things like that
when they see red. But red can also represent lust, red lipstick, red roses, people blush
red when in that heavy “game of thrones”-esque passion, I mean it’s no accident that
brothels are in what’s called the RED light district in Amsterdam. It’s a natural color that
we see in nature and our subconscious brings those to light when we see images with
heavy uses of red. Every color has their subconscious association with them. Some
have multiple ones. Green for instance, depending on the brightness or saturation of it
can feel like a healthy fresh color, representing nature blooming, OR it can represent
sickness or greed. It all depends on its usage. As a general rule of thumb to follow,
more often than not, warm colors make us feel excitement and energy while cool colors
are more calming and relaxing. The reason I wanted to go into this before discussing
color schemes is because color is what is important. The color scheme just keeps your
colors balanced, but the specific colors that you use are what will influence the viewers
feelings, so just keep that in mind.

I thought about going over each color and actually got halfway through them while
writing this script before I realized that it’s such an ambiguous topic that I’d rather leave
it up to your own discovery. Hearing and seeing how yellow, at it’s same saturation and
brightness can either be a light hearted happy color or an unnerving cautionary color
made me realize that half of what I’d be spouting is all heavily theoretical and
situational. So take the time to explore some of your favorite movies or paintings and
observe the colors used, how they make you feel, what is the scene about and why
were those colors used to represent that scene. Then take that information, steal it,
snatch it out of that horribly famous artist who you envy, you envy so much you hate
them even. And use what you learned from them in your own work… never tell a soul…
die with this secret…

Let’s go over color schemes!

Monochromatic

Monochromatic color schemes are ones that strictly use only one color. Not similar
colors or slight hue shifts but still the same general color. Pick a hue and either brighten
or darken it, desaturate or saturate, that’s it.

Analogous

Analogous color schemes consist of only a small group of colors in one portion of the
color wheel. So let’s say you have a painting that is primarily green and you want it to
feel calming or alive, you could make it an analogous color scheme and introduce
yellow and blue into it as well. This is generally why so many of the backgrounds in
Miyazaki films feel so damn nice and calming to us.

Complementary

Complementary color schemes are where you would use two colors directly opposite
one another in the color wheel. You see this most commonly in the onslaught of blue
and orange movie posters, some of you have probably seen memes poking fun at it.
There are many other options for complementary colors, but yes blue and orange is an
exciting one and works well. Other options would be purple and yellow, red and green,
and whatever colors in between those main three examples. When you start playing
around with saturation and brightness you can get a lot of variety from the same exact
colors.

Split Complementary

Split Complementary is similar to complementary. The difference is instead of using the

exact opposite of one color, you use it’s neighbors. So let’s use the blue and orange
example again. Instead of blue and orange, it’d be orange and teal with violet. Or
alternatively it could be blue with (according to this color wheel) vermillion and amber….
God that’s way fancier than just calling it red-orange and yellow-orange. This doesn’t
create quite a striking contrast of colors and makes it feel a little more balanced and
harmonized. Personally this is my favorite color scheme to use in my illustrations and
characters and I didn’t even know it was a possible color scheme for a very long time.

Triadic

Triadic color schemes are pretty straightforward, it consists of three colors perfectly
spread out between the color wheel. So the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue
make up a triadic color scheme. So do the secondary colors of green, orange, and
violet. There are more options in between these, and the options ca differ depending on
the color wheel you’re using, but those are some major ones.

Tetradic

Tetradic color schemes are the last one we are going to go over. These ones are a little
more complicated than the others, but not too bad. So we’ve already gone over
complementary colors. Tetradic color schemes are when you combine TWO
complementary color schemes together. So, for instance, if you had blue and orange be
your first complementary pair, you could combine them with yellow and purple, another
complementary pair. The four of those would make up a tetradic color scheme. Another
example would be that if instead of yellow and purple you went with red and green. That
would also create a balanced tetradic scheme.

With these variations of color schemes and all of the possible color combinations you
should never run out of interesting ways to display the color in your image. I think too
many beginners forget to go back to these basic foundations of color theory and will try
to do something crazy and exciting, but because they don’t know how to control
saturation or how to create a balanced color scheme, the whole image will fall apart.
The controlling saturation part is something I want to bring up actually, when giving
feedback to early artists, a common trend I’ll see is that a lot of beginning artists will
take the time to establish a color scheme, however their colors are incredibly saturated.
Saturation can be amazing, but only when used appropriately. Treat it like booze, too
much and you’ll turn into a sloppy mess. Saturation in an image is only special when in
contrast to areas of lesser contrast. So you can have that neat complementary color
scheme of purple and orange, that’s great, but try to find one color to remain the
dominant and one the submissive. Let one reign and the other support. Try it out for
yourself and experiment though, because as much as I can talk about all of this color
theory stuff, it’s still just a theory, it should be explored and experimented with.

Storytelling through Color

So, we’ve talked about color schemes and theories and how to use them, what they are,
etc. But some of you might not be limited to the ideas of just single illustrations or
character designs. Some of you might want to become storytellers and might be
wondering how you can use color to help influence the telling of your story. Whether it’s
a ongoing comic book, graphic novel, maybe even a series of illustrations. Whatever it
may be, color is an amazing storytelling device and should not be passed up or given
little thought.
I used this example when I taught a weekend course at Portland State University, I don’t
mention that to brag or anything (it was a weekend course and the school gave me a
ton of film students instead of art so… yeah lots to brag about that weekend), but out of
all my ramblings of anatomy and illustrating to these poor misplaced film students, this
section got the biggest reaction (well, this and the ‘how to get a job’ part of the course).
They all came out of it having a completely different view of how color can be
implemented in your stories and it was great to see. So, I’m hoping you all can get some
use out of these examples.

And what better example, than a Pixar film? Yes, Pixar films are the shit. It’s undeniable
that their use of color is, as the kids would say, lit AF. I’m using Monster’s University as
the vehicle for this portion of teaching so I apologize in advance for any spoilers, but it
doesn’t spoil too much. Let’s start with the beginning of the film!

1- The film opens up to a gorgeous Fall morning with insanely vibrant colors. Yellow
trees and purple shadows with a nice teal sky, a perfect triadic color scheme. What’s
also important in this first scene of the bus full of little kid monsters is that it’s set at a
lower angle looking up at the bus, this’ll be important for later.

2- There is a scene where all of the kids are getting off of the school bus and little Mike
Wazowski is looking for a partner to buddy up with. He comes across a furry BLUE
student, similar to the blue of Sully. The two of them would’ve made a nice color
scheme that blended well. This kid brushes him off though and finds a different buddy,
one with yellow skin, giving them a nice blue and yellow complementary scheme if we
are going with the RGB color wheel (which I’m sure they were going with since this is all
a digital medium).
3- With no partners to choose, Mike is stuck with the teacher. He’s embarrassed by this
like any kid would be. To put emphasis on this embarrassment they have the teacher
and him contrast, being a complementary pink and green. Forcing him to stick out
because of the contrast.

4- This is a shot that pans up before we cut to a scene within the factory. I just wanted
to mention two things here. Again, the nice triadic color scheme of yellow, teal, and
purple, and I also wanted to remind you of how vibrant it currently is. This will be called
back to in a little bit.

5- We cut into the factory where all of the kids have gathered together and are about to
look out into the scare room. The scene is heavily on the blue side with a little bit of
purple shining on the characters near the front. This is another shot that I wanted for
comparison later on, just pay attention to the saturation.

6- GOD DANG THAT PURPLE! Ooh, so juicy. That nice soothing purple with some
blue. The purple really gives this scene that magical feel, it’s the big reveal, the “scare
room!” It’s what Mike has been waiting to see his whole life and him and the other kids
just can’t believe how pretty it is.

7- Now… fast forward several years. Mike is arriving in a different bus to his first day of
Monster’s University. The bus is gray, the world is less saturated and magical. The color
scheme is a lot more analogous and mundane, the cars across the street are all grey or
blue just to not contrast. Even the angle we view this bus at is higher as opposed to
lower. The two scenes being compared perfectly encapsulates how shitty and not
magical adult life is. It’s such a small touch, but tells a lot with just visuals.

8- This shot, essentially the counterpart to looking up at the Monster’s Inc. building, is a
lot more tame. Still beautiful, very colorful and pretty, but with a very analogous color
scheme. Blues, greens, a little yellow, but not much. Everything to make something feel
more settled and natural, less magical and new.

9- Hell even look at this scene of Mike getting off the bus. Everything is SO gray and
toned down compared to the childhood shots.

10- Here is a counterpart scene to that first scene of the kids seeing the inside of
Monster’s Inc. Before, everything was dark and mysterious, the blue and purlple only
emphasized that. Now, Mike is an adult and knows more about life, the mystery and
intrigue sucked out of him, he’s essentially “not in the dark” if you want to put it like that.
The scene is lit with a bright, almost colorless light.

See? Stories can be told with just still images, and a good use of color. Color can be
used as the major tool or play more of a support role to the main story. Either way, it will
help you express your intent.

I have a few more examples, but these are more dedicated to the characters
themselves and how their colors interact with one another and what that can tell us
about their involvement in the story.

11- This is Mike and Randall’s first interaction in Monster’s University. In the movie they
begin as friends and roommates, but of course, we know by watching Monster’s Inc.
that Randall is the eventual antagonist. Randall is naturally an antagonist to Mike with
his instant contrast to Mike’s green skin. Their complementary scheme implies a sense
of competition or contrast in character or personality.

12- Here however, we can see Mike and Sully having their first one on one interaction in
the movie. We can see here that the hue of Mike and Sully combine create a
Split-Complementary scheme. The difference between a complementary scheme and a
split-complementary is that a split-complementary is more balanced and harmonious.
Where as Randall is the complete opposite of Mike and therefore is his nemesis.

13(15)- Here is a scene where Mike and Sully go out to meet with fraternities about
potentially joining them. They give the main fraternity house a bold red and yellow to
help show how powerful they are, two strong warm colors. The teal of Sully is a
complementary color to the red, making him stand out amongst them the most. Mike
actually has no color relation to these guys, which for awhile kind of boggled my mind a
bit as to how they wouldn’t have them interact with him color-wise. That being said, in
just the next scene the frat leader gestures towards the fraternity he THINKS Mike
should join, the “losers of the school.

14- And sure enough, it’s green and yellow, where he would fit right in.

I hope this gave you all a good glimpse at how color can be used for your storytelling.
Whether it’s making viewers sub-consciously feel like someone is a future antagonist or
making two friends feel like they match one another in the world, color can be used for
all of that.

Studying Techniques

We’re finally nearing the end here. I hope this info will be useful for some of you out
there. The majority of what we’ve discussed in this video, color schemes, color theory,
storytelling through color, etc. will more than likely need to be explored through personal
experience and practice and application. Try to take some of what I’ve discussed and
directly apply it into your work or at least consider this knowledge when in the early
stages of developing an image.
A few things that I do think are possible to directly study to improve on are some of the
aspects of color theory that were mentioned earlier in the video. Hue, saturation, color
relativity, local color. All of those things are something that people’s eyes aren’t
generally accustomed to seeing and needing to identify immediately on any given color
wheel. So there are a few things I take into consideration when doing a color-focused
study.

1) First of all, make sure that the study you are doing is about color. It’s hard
enough studying color alone, so to try and study color AND anatomy AND
values, etc. can be very tricky. So the majority of my color studies are done when
I’m creating a new illustration and want some inspiration (I steal it, I totally
fucking steal it) on a color or lighting scenario. I’ll usually go to a website like
animationscreencaps.com or if it’s for an image that requires a little more realistic
use of color I’ll generally hunt down some screencaps from Game of Thrones or
something and I will try and paint from the reference.
2) Now, after you make sure that your main focus is color, naturally values and
lighting will have to play some role if you are copying directly from the reference,
but that’s besides the point. After you make sure your focus is on color, what I
personally try to do is take a brush that has no opacity feature on, take my hand
away from whatever color picker shortcut key I generally use, and start the brutal
task of trying my best to match each color, hue, saturation, value and all with
every brush stroke. It is agonizing, so I will usually do a rough drawing at first so
I’m not also having to concern myself with adjusting the drawing later on. Try
your best and really focus on what color you think you see, what that color looks
like in relation to the surrounding colors, what the overall color filter is on the
scene, etc. It’s ok, we will get through this together.
3) Finally, after I’ve blocked the majority of the image in the flat colors that I think
are fairly accurate to the reference image I then color pick my colors and
compare them with the colors in the reference image. As a side note, generally I
 give myself a 30-60 minute time limit so I don’t get caught up in the small details
and I stay focused. After comparing the colors I try to make any observations I
can think of, how are my hues different? Are my colors too saturated? Not
saturated enough? Am I considering color relativity enough in my decision
making? Etc. Any observation like this that I make I try to jot down a little note or
two to help me remember (seriously I can’t stress this step enough, notes help a
ton).

And that’s it, that exercise has improved my eye for color quite a bit over the years.
Early on I would try to do at least one study like this every new portfolio piece I worked
on (on top of the other specific studies for the image) and it always made me way more
confident in choosing my colors in an image.

Developing an eye for hue, saturation, temperature, etc. is so important when it comes
to considering how you are going to approach your color schemes in an image, and are
even more important for maintaining that approach you set out for and don’t have it
deviate from your initial plans. Nothing is worse than doing some rough colors for an
illustration, getting it to a really good place that you are happy with, but then when the
painting process starts you can’t quite get that same feel with the final colors. It happens
to everyone, don’t worry about it, just remember if this happens to you to follow what we
discussed in this video. If the colors are looking incorrect to you, do the following:

1) Check the values: The values are always going to be more important than the
colors. Incorrect values will have your image looking anywhere from washed out,
to chaotic and harsh on the eyes. Adjusting these will usually be the quickest fix.
2) Check the color temperatures: The simplest rule of color is that if it’s a cool light
there will be a warm shadow, and a warm light will have a cool shadow. Many
beginner artists will forget this or will remain very tame with their decision
making. Either by having a consistent hue and saturation throughout both light
 and shadow or by only adjusting the saturation slightly in either the light or
shadow. Don’t be afraid to be bold, color is meant to be playful and expressive.
Don’t be nervous to shift the hues more or play with higher or lower saturation.
Generally if you remain within the confines of the two rules: 1) Good Values 2)
Accurate color temperatures, your colors will still read very naturally and not be
off putting.

Thanks for purchasing this video, I hope you could take something from it, whether it’s a
lot or a little. I really appreciate the support and I hope to make more of these in the
future. For now, if you’re interested, the next episode in the series is on Perspective, so
hopefully I’ll talk to you again there… for hours… and hours… and hours...